Bringing Programmatic to Local TV

Since its founding days, Rhiza has pioneered the way media companies use data. Having worked with the largest media players in the world like Comcast, BBC and Cox, we knew we had the experience and technical savvy to bring programmatic ad selling to the $146 billion local media market. Rhiza for Ad Sales adds enormous targeting power to local TV ad sales by combining deep consumer insights and comScore or Nielsen ratings in one solution, without the need to change the way they are delivering those ads.

BIA/Kelsey, the authority when it comes to market forecasting in the local media space predicts that 70% of advertising spend will still go to traditional media in 2016. While digital has not yet turned out to be the big local market disrupter it was expected to be, its rise has to be taken seriously. In fact, the big changes in the market are happening just at the right pace for local TV stations to prepare themselves for the next generation of ad selling.

Rhiza’s data tools find an advertiser’s best targets and pair them with the ad inventory most likely to influence purchasing behavior. Local television stations offer ad inventory on live tv broadcasts as well as digital ads. Finding the right blend of inventory that best targets an advertiser’s audience requires enormous quantities of excellent data from many sources, the tools to quickly analyze that data and the ability to prescribe specific actions. The data challenges are significant. The data for tracking digital advertising (which accounts for about 30% of local ad revenue) performance is plagued with problems of accuracy, fraud and fragmentation. Television measurement data gets a bad rap but is actually no worse and in fact may be better than most digital ad tracking. Even worse, at a local level, tracking what the industry calls “lift” (how much advertisers’ revenue increases as a result of advertising) is needed but almost impossible.

Rhiza’s unique approach to solving these problems is by no means simple. Our data scientists, human-computer interaction experts, business analysts and computer scientists have come together to tame this incredibly complex set of problems. We take billions of data points from many different data sources, run proprietary algorithms that analyze past consumer behavior, use that data to create predictive models of the probabilities of specific actions going forward, and then generate actual recommendations for optimizing an individual local advertiser’s ad spend. To the end user (a salesperson or researcher), all of this complexity is hidden. They type in the name of the advertiser, hit a button and seconds later a visually compelling sales-ready presentation is available.

For local television to stay strong in the ad sales market they have to prove their unique targeting value. Rhiza is in the business of arming local broadcast TV with the data mix that they need, at a price point they can afford and in a quantity that is useful to them. Rhiza for Ad Sales accelerates the sales process by showing revenue-driving data points from IHS/Polk auto registrations, Scarborough local surveys, the national voter registration file and Nielsen or comScore TV ratings.

Rhiza for Ad Sales is simple to use and understand, only displaying the crucial infographics that will help tell the best story. The data for these infographics is curated from different Big Data sources to tell a concise story around the value proposition of local television at one push of a button. As the world experiences a data explosion, the challenge is not to find data, the challenge is to curate relevant insights in one instance. That is just what our team of developers and data scientists have done. They came up with a groundbreaking set of algorithms that arm salespeople with prescriptive analytics that generate revenue fast.

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Rhiza is pioneering the way media companies generate revenue with data. With Rhiza for Research and Rhiza for Marketing, media companies better understand their audience, their content and their advertisers by visualizing, analyzing and sharing information derived from disparate data sets. Rhiza for Ad Sales delivers detailed recommendations based on integrated consumer insights. Rhiza, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA, is used by the most progressive media brands, including: BBC Worldwide, Comcast, Univision, Cox Media, and Cox Automotive. For more information, please visit rhiza.com.